Names, brands, writing, and the language of commerce.

March 19, 2014

“We’ve turned learning vocabulary into an addictive game,” says Vocabulary.com, which this week announced its new app (iPhone and iPad only, for now). Vocabulary.com’s chief technology officer, Mark Tinkler, told Fast Company that some people play “over 10 hours a day. It’s crazy.”

You’ve probably heard about Facebook COO Sheryl “Lean In” Sandberg’s campaign to ban the “bossy” descriptor for girls and women. Perhaps you’ve tangentially wondered, as I did, why cows are frequently called “Bossy,” at least in the U.S. There are two theories, and “no matter which of the two theories you pick, you end up in Latin.” (World Wide Words)

I attended my first roller derby match a couple of weekends ago, and couldn’t believe my ears when the announcer said that Fatal Dreidel would be skating for the Oakland Outlaws. Not only is that her actual nom de derby, it turns out there’s a whole subgenre of Jewish derby pseudonyms, including Mayhem Bialik, Yom Tripper, and Hebrewno Mars. (Jewniverse, via Diane Fischler.)

For more on derby names, see my May 2011 linkfest and law professor Dave Fagundes’s “Talk Derby to Me” (great title!), on “intellectual property norms governing roller derby pseudonyms,” published in 2012 in the Texas Law Review.

Our inspiration is two distinctly American writers known for their rugged individualism, sense of adventure and wild prose, Jack London, born in Oakland, and Jack Kerouac, native of Lowell, Mass., home to many of America textile mills during the Industrial Revolution.

Minor correction: Jack London spent his childhood in Oakland, but he was born (in 1876, as John Griffith London) across the bay in San Francisco.

Most jacks derive from the English proper name Jack, including the first one, jakke, “a mechanical device,” which first appeared in the late 14th century. The Online Etymology Dictionary has an extensive entry on jack and its variations. Here’s an excerpt:

The proper name was used in Middle English for “any common fellow” (mid-14c.), and thereafter extended to various appliances replacing servants (1570s). Used generically of men (jack-of-all-trades, 1610s), male animals (1620s, see jackass, jackdaw, etc.), and male personifications (1520s, e.g. Jack Frost, 1826).

As the name of a device for pulling off boots, from 1670s. The jack in a pack of playing cards (1670s) is in German Bauer “peasant.”* Jack shit “nothing at all” is attested by 1968, U.S. slang. The plant jack-in-the-pulpit is attested by 1837. Jack the Ripper was active in London 1888. The jack of Union Jack is a nautical term for “small flag at the bow of a ship” (1630s).

The verb sense—to hoist, to raise—was originally an Americanism from the mid-19th century, as was the figurative sense—“to increase prices, etc.” (1904). The Online Etymology Dictionary again:

Jack off (v.) “to masturbate” is attested from 1916, probably from jack (n.) in the sense of “penis.”

The Oxford English Dictionary has many additional entries for jack.Monterey Jack cheese is named for David Jacks (originally David Jack), a Scottish-born dairy rancher who first made the cheese in Monterey County, California, in the 1880s. Jack as a slang term for money is an Americanism from the late 19th century. And since at least 1930, the verb to jack has meant “to take illegally, to steal”; this jack is a shortening of the earlier hijack (origin unknown).

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the children’s game known as jacks comes from jack-stones, originally check-stones, “a small smooth round pebble.”

Jacks game from How Retro, which also gives the game’s history and rules.

January 16, 2014

My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus, “Duds We Love, Duds We Don’t,” starts with a question: How is clothing similar to bombs that don’t detonate? The answer: They’re both called duds. And not by accident.

Access to the full column is restricted to subscribers (just $19.95 a year!). Here’s an excerpt:

Short words are handy for brand naming, too, so it’s no surprise that “duds” is a popular combining term for casual-clothing labels. Cuddl Duds, a manufacturer of thermal underwear and pajamas, has been in business since 1978; regardless of how you feel about the truncation of “cuddle,” you’ll have to grant that the “ud” repetition makes the name fun to say.

Cuddl Duds package.

A scan of the U.S. trademark database also turns up live trademarks for Dorm Duds (pajamas), Chef Duds (restaurant apparel), Dazzle Dudz (iron-on patches), O Duds (organic-fiber clothing), Storm Duds (umbrellas and ponchos given as promotional items), Lil’ Duds (children’s apparel; variously spelled abbreviations for “little” are common among brand names), Doggiduds (yes, clothing for dogs), and many other Duds. There are a number of Duds ’n Suds coin laundries nationwide; the ones in Reno, Nevada, have on-site slot machines and beer, giving the business name a double meaning.

And then there’s Milk Duds, the candy brand that’s been around since 1926. You’ll have to read the rest of the column to learn its story.

Blog bonus: I keep it strictly G-rated for the Visual Thesaurus, but I can’t resist sharing some slightly risqué “duds” marks in the US trademark database:

Dildudzfiled for trademark protection in May 2013 and is still awaiting registration. A description from the website: “a line of novelty outfits that you can use to play ‘dress up’ with your favorite dildo or vibrator.”

According to Oxford, “the frequency of the word selfie in the English language has increased by 17,000% since this time last year.” The word first surfaced in 2002 on an Australian online forum; it was added to OxfordDictionaries.com in August 2013. (The Australian citation was discovered earlier this year by a member of the American Dialect Society listserv, HugoVK, who posted it to Wiktionary.)

Selfie was independently selected by the American language scholar Allan Metcalf, who a month ago wrote in Lingua Franca that selfie was a “perfect word”:

It’s transparently about the self. It’s selfish, but the diminutive suffix -ie makes it cute selfish instead of mean selfish. And it is quite literally a self expression, in both senses of that term.

Runners-up in the Oxford contest included twerk, binge-watch, bitcoin, and two Fritinancy words of the week: showrooming (April 2012) and shmeat (May 2013).

November 11, 2013

Petrel: Any pelagic seabird of the order Procellariiformes, in particular the shearwaters (Procellariidae), the storm-petrels (Hydrobatidae), and the diving petrels (Pelecanoididae). All have “long wings, mainly black (or grey or brown) and white plumage, and a slightly hooked bill with tubular external nostrils” (OED).

“Petrel” is the English translation of the Chinese word Haiyan, which is the international name of the “supertyphoon” that has ravaged large areas of the Philippines in recent days. (In the Philippines, the typhoon was called Yolanda.) The typhoon, one of the most powerful ever recorded, brought waves as high as 15 feet and may have a death toll of as many as 10,000 people, according to weekend reports. (Photos of the devastation here and here.)

The origin of the word “petrel” is “uncertain and disputed,” says the OED. A 17th-century spelling was pitteral; the Online Etymology Dictionary when the English explorer William Dampier recorded the modern spelling in 1703, he wrote that “the bird was so called from its way of flying with its feet just skimming the surface of the water, which recalls the apostle's walk on the sea of Galilee (Matt. xiv:28); if so, it likely was formed in English as a diminutive of Peter (Late Latin Petrus).” However, this is likely a fanciful folk etymology.

Although “storm petrel” is the correct ornithological term, a famous poem by Maxim Gorky has sometimes been translated from the Russian with the title “The Song of the Stormy Petrel,” and “stormy” frequently appears in the bird’s name. Here is one stanza as translated by Lyudmila Purgina:

The stormy petrel, screaming, hovers, As the black lightning in heavens, As an arrow, he is piercing The grey clouds, with his wing He is picking up the wave's foam.

The poem is a call for revolution written as a fable; after its publication in April 1901, Gorky was arrested and later released.

July 01, 2013

Soucriant: A character from the folklore of the Caribbean island of Dominica: a vampire witch who sheds her skin at night and turns into a fireball, flying through the sky and sucking blood from animals and people. Also spelled soucouyant or soucouyan.

There are conflicting etymologies for soucriant/soucouyant. The Dominican anthropologist and writer Lennox Honychurch says the word is derived from French sucer, “to suck,” while other researchers have traced it to sukunyadyo (masculine) and sukunya (feminine), words for “man-eating witch” in the Fula and Soninke languages of West Africa.

Soucriant may receive wider notice thanks to Byzantium, the new film from director Neil Jordan that had its U.S. release last week. In her review for the New York Times, critic Manohla Dargis devoted some space to defining terms:

Clara [played by Gemma Arterton] and her companion, Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan), don’t call themselves vampires: they’re soucriants, a variation on soucouyant. (A vampire witch from Caribbean folk culture, the traditional soucouyant lives as an old woman by day but at night sloughs off her skin and turns into a fireball to hunt.) The Dominica-born writer Jean Rhys preferred the word soucriant.

“Your face like dead woman and your eyes red like soucriant,” a woman says in Rhys’s novel “Wide Sargasso Sea,” which may be where the playwright-turned-screenwriter Moira Buffini first read it.

The Byzantium of the film’s title is the name of a hotel where the main characters stay. It’s also the ancient Greek city (now Istanbul) that gave its name to the Byzantine Empire (4th to 15th centuries CE). It wasn’t until 1937 that the first citation of byzantine to mean “complex, devious, rigid, filled with intrigue” was recorded.

June 03, 2013

“Smiley Face Unicorn Glitter Mega Platform Wedge Hand Made Collaged Art Creepers” on Etsy. The platform is 4 inches high at the heel.

The Smithsonian blog Threaded traces the history of “creepers” to a 1953 name-of-the-dance hit song, “The Creep,” recorded by British big-band leader Ken Mackintosh. “A slow shuffle movement, it was embraced by a subculture called the Teddy Boys, who became known as creepers”:

In addition to distinguishing themselves by their musical preferences, Teddy Boys made themselves known through their dandy-like sartorial choices that referenced the early 20th century. A popular look included drainpipe pants with exposed socks, tailored drapey jackets, button-down shirts, brogues, Oxfords or crepe-soled shoes. Those ridged, thick-crepe-soled shoes with suede or leather uppers became known as “creepers” because of their association with the Creep dance (and maybe because if you misspelled crepe, you got creep?).

Maybe, but crepe (or crêpe) and creep are unrelated etymologically. Crepe comes via French from a Latin root meaning “curled.” (Yes, it’s the same word whether you’re talking about a thin pancake, crinkly paper, or rubber with a corrugated surface. Because of the crumpled look of its petals, crape myrtle is related, too.) Creep comes from Old English créopan, which meant pretty much what it does today: “To move with the body prone and close to the ground, as a short-legged reptile, an insect, a quadruped moving stealthily, a human being on hands and feet, or in a crouching posture.” (OED)

Creepers became known as brothel creepers when British soldiers returned home from fighting World War II. From Smithsonian.com: “Still wearing their crepe-soled, military-issued boots, they hit the London nightclubs.”

Creepers’ popularity declined in the 1960s but re-emerged during the punk scene of the 1970s. They’re back again in exaggerated styles similar to the flatforms of several seasons ago.

Retailer Urban Outfitters currently sells 37 styles of creepers on its website – all for women, interestingly. One brand, T.U.K., based in Poway, California, accounts for about 40 percent of them.

Footwear footnote: Sneakers or sneaks to mean “soft-soled footwear” is very similar in connotation to creepers but much older. According to the OED, sneaks was used in this sense at least as early as 1862 (“The night~officer is generally accustomed to wear a species of India~rubber shoes or goloshes on her feet. These are termed ‘sneaks’ by the women [of Brixton Prison]”. Sneakers is classified as “orig. and chiefly U.S.”; the earliest citation is from an 1895 edition of Funk’s Standard Dictionary of the English Language. In 1900 the American humorist George Ade wrote in More Fables: “His Job on this Earth was to put on a pair of Pneumatic Sneakers every Morning and go out and investigate Other People's Affairs.”

May 16, 2013

Newt Gingrich—remember when he ran for president and talked about building bases on the moon?—now appears to be campaigning for Andy Rooney’s old slot on “60 Minutes.” “We’re really puzzled,” he tells his YouTube audience, a look of grave concern furrowing his brow, a familiar-looking device in his hand. “We spent weeks [!] trying to figure out whaddya call this.” This is what you and I call a cell phone or a mobile phone or a smartphone, but that doesn’t satisfy Gingrich. He’s soliciting new, more precise names for the gizmo he used to call “a handheld computer.” Commenters have been gleefully obliging; my favorite nominations are Talkie-Viewie (maybe “TV” for short?), roundcorner-camera-communicati­ons-email-apps-thingy, iMoon, and horseless telephone. (Via TechCrunch.)

I caught this a few days too late for Underwear Week but can’t resist sharing it anyway. Triumph, the Swiss bra company, last week introduced its concept bra of the year at a Tokyo press conference. The theme: “branomics,” “a playful take on Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's ‘three-arrow’ economic revival plan,” according to Reuters. “We hope that as the Japanese economy grows, we can also help bust sizes to get bigger,” said a Triumph spokeswoman. (Via The 3% Conference.)

Andris Pone of Coin Branding, in Toronto, applauds Frogbox, a “green” moving company in more than one sense. It’s a great brand story, Andris writes: “The Frogbox positioning statement, From one pad to another, exemplifies the message of ease by creating a promise (completely delivered on) that one can move from their old home to their new one with all the difficulty of a hop.”

Corporate buzzword-wise, “delight” is shaping up to be the new “passion.” (Via MJF.)

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You’ll need to subscribe to Visual Thesaurus to read Mike Pope’s excellent column, “What’s in a -Nym?”, which goes beyond antonyms and synonyms to more obscure and fascinating terms like contranym, retronym, and backronym. But of course you’re already a subscriber.

I also can’t resist an opportunity to combine entomology, etymology, and a plug for Fritinancy. As language maven Ben Zimmer—my editor at Visual Thesaurus—observed in an email to me:

I noticed that the first OED cite for “fritin(i)ancy” is from Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica, talking about cicadas. (In this edition, it’s actually “fritinnitus.”) Johnson defined “fritinancy” as “the scream of an insect, as the cricket or cicada” (citing Browne) and subsequent dictionaries used similar definitions. (Johnson didn’t define “cicada,” oddly enough.)

My original post about Fritinancy cited Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913), which mentioned crickets but not cicadas. The post was written before I had access to the OED online, a weak defense but the one I’m sticking with.

But, Ben told me, “there are plenty of people who pronounce it KAH, and many dictionaries give it as an acceptable alternate. I don’t have a good sense of the regional distribution of the two pronunciations, though.”

April 16, 2013

As recently as a few decades ago, most parents gave their children names that would help them fit in: to a family, a clan, or the culture at large. Now a lot of parents want exactly the opposite: names that stand out, as though children were boxes of cereal competing for shelf space. Standing out is the new fitting in. Three recent articles examine the trend:

“How Much Does Your Name Matter?” is a Freakonomics Radio podcast about the effect of a personal name on school performance, career success, and other outcomes. It opens with a story about a sociologist who named his children E and Yo.

“What Is a Popular Baby Name?” is Laura Wattenberg’s objective and surprising analysis of name popularity. “Even the most popular name in America is given to just one out of every 177 babies,” writes Wattenberg, the author of the respected – and, yes, popular – Baby Name Wizard blog.

NPR has launched an excellent new blog called Code Switch that covers “the frontiers of race, culture, and ethnicity.” Code switching is a term from linguistics, and many of the posts are about language. Start here, with the introductory post “How Code Switching Explains the World.”

How does our algorithm work? It periodically checks the New York Times home page for newly published articles. Then it scans each sentence looking for potential haikus by using an electronic dictionary containing syllable counts. We started with a basic rhyming lexicon, but over time we've added syllable counts for words like “Rihanna” or “terroir” to keep pace with the broad vocabulary of The Times.

April 13, 2013

Who’s minding the store at Target? A week ago Consumerist reported that the retailer was selling a plus-size dress in a color unflatteringly called Manatee Gray. (A manatee is also known as a sea cow.) This week there’s been a cross-lingual dustup over a sandal style called “Orina,” which means “urine” in Spanish.

Image from Yahoo Shine. Target quickly removed the product page and is said to be renaming the style.

“Does no one speak Spanish at Target HQ or have access to this thing we call Google?” asked Consumerist reporter Mary Beth Quirk. No and no, apparently. Target’s initial defense was that “orina” means “peaceful” in Russian. As though Russian rather than Spanish were the second-most-spoken language in the United States, after English.

I learned about Target’s number-one problem via a tweet from Mighty Red Pen, who also sent me a link to Yahoo Shine’s coverage of the story. Full marks to senior editor Lylah M. Alphonse, whose recounting of other notable naming gaffes sets the record straight on the Chevy Nova “no-go” myth.

Target isn’t the only business with Orina issues. A similar etymological fallacy led to the naming of Café Orina in the Bay Area city of Concord, California.

When Maura Storace sent me the photo, she commented, “I wonder if the coffee they serve is amber-colored?”

Narrative: This was the name of the Greek goddess of peace. Until the 20th century, it was commonly pronounced in three syllables (i-REE-nee).

Very nice, but there are almost 700,000 native Spanish speakers in the San Francisco Bay Area, and only a relative handful of Greek speakers.

Moral: Check several bilingual dictionaries before committing to a lovely-sounding exotic name. And know your market.

And as long as this post is already in the toilet, here’s Kmart’s new TV spot, which – incongruously for a retailer not known for creative marketing – takes positive glee in its potty humor. The much-repeated tagline is “Ship my pants.”

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For more on the British idiom “taking the piss” – not to be confused with “taking a piss” – read this.